Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages

Status Reports

Status: Web-Tools (2017 - December)

This Project was alluded to briefly in a footnote on research methodology in my original Research Proposal1 under the head Research - Internet Technology2. When last at Birkbeck, I wrote a more extensive paper3 defending the Project and describing its rationale. Now that my PhD is in suspense, I have decided to take this Project further. There’s a lot to do: still quite a few items on the “wish list”. It is fairly critical as an enabler for my research, so I need to get a move on as I want it all out of the way before I re-start4 formal research.

About 10 years ago, I created a website for Dr. Sophie Botros (Link), one of my supervisors at Birkbeck. I’ve now taken it back on and spruced it up a bit, though it requires more work.

I’ve created and maintain a small website for a music group Julie and I attend – the Enigma Ensemble (Link).

Most recently, I’ve created a website for displaying the textual and grammatical analyses and appendices of Pete’s PhD on the Acts of the Apostles. It exists in two versions: Live (Link) and Test (Link).

I created and / or ran a multitude of bridge websites, but as of January 2018 I have either handed them over or mothballed them9:-

I established the Hutton Bridge Club Website (Link) in 4Q11 using the standard Bridgewebs service, but with a couple of competitions using my own routines.

In 1Q15, I took over the support and development of the Essex Contract Bridge Association (ECBA) website (Link), which also uses Bridgewebs, but is very much larger. I wrote a lot of code10 to make this job less tedious.

For several years, I collected data on bridge activity in the Billericay / Brentwood area (needed for a project to set up a new consolidated club) – by “scraping” data off web pages, consolidating it into a database and modelling it in various ways – I have agreed to hand over this data sometime early in 2018.

I used this data to generate websites with a multitude of ladders for small clubs (Link). These are now mothballed.

In 3Q16 I revived the archive website for Mountnessing Bridge Club (Link).

I created and maintained a new website for the First Class Bridge Academy (Link), giving it “small clubs” ladders as these were easy to maintain with little intervention.

I did consider returning to work part-time as an MS Access/Excel developer, with a spin-off into website generation, but have done nothing about it so far.

However, I did manage to spend almost 84 hours on my own site. This work included:-

A considerable amount of work on WebRefs in an attempt to sort out the broken links. This requires still more work, in documentation, development and data correction, but I’m getting there. I documented the system, generated a list of changes, and implemented most of them. I developed the “global change” function, and fixed the YouTube problems, as promised last time.

Sorted out a bug in the Code Archive routines, whereby the archive wasn’t working; recovered previous versions OK from backups, and produced “recent changes” pages.

Added feature whereby the Note-link can be deduced rather than the ID having to be specified. Needs further work.

Further details appear below.

Work on hand-over and close-down of my various bridge websites. A small amount left to be carried forward to the next quarter.

During 4Q17 I expended 196 hours on this project (196 hours YTD, where for “YTD” – Year to Date – I mean the academic year that commenced in October 2017). That’s 99% of planned effort, 99% YTD. Overall, 28% of my project effort in the Quarter was directed towards this Project (making 28% YTD) – as against 28% planned (28% YTD).

I’ve reduced the planned weekly effort on this project by an hour to 14 hours, partly to reflect my abandonment of all my bridge sites but to allow time for education. My intention over the next 12 months11 is to focus on sorting out my website, together with updating my technical competence. Because I may change the technology of my site, I will treat it as substantially “on hold” until I’ve re-educated myself.

Own Website:

The following items require urgent attention:-

Provide a facility to embed Notes in others – use for “disclaimers” etc.

WebRefs: → Re-document the procedures in the light of recent changes. → Resolve issues generated / revealed by the spider. → Fix historical problems whereby the URL returned differs from that requested.